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Monday, July 20, 2015

I sorta thought by this point that I would be up to writing new posts every other day, but every time I get close to being caught up, some new unusual thing pops up and I have to burn an afternoon on going to the dentist, buying potting soil, taking plants to the consignment store, mailing plants out, or catching up on the watering I didn't do the previous day because I was too exhausted to finish. Stuff like that. Consequently, I don't have time for the blog very often, and when I do, I usually don't have the photos ready for whatever post I want to write. So basically it's been six weeks of working as hard as I can and never quite getting caught up on anything, and I'm tired.

Quite a few Anthuriums have bloomed for the first time since I last blogged about 0112 "Dottie A. Rebel" way back on June 7,1 and there have been new first-time buds on many more, though some of those subsequently failed to develop.2 As usual, some of the new blooms are crap, most are boring, and a couple are very nice, but I won't tell you which are which because I'm still hoping to get actual posts written about all of those.

This post is not about any of those, though. This post is about the recent notable deaths.

[reader scrolls back up to the title, reads, scrolls back down]

Yeah, that's right. 'Midori' is gone, after about eleven months. I don't know what happened there, exactly: it was a watering problem of some kind, possibly exacerbated by excessively hot or cold temperatures, but by the time I realized that there was a problem, it was too late to determine what had caused it or do anything to bring the plant back. This is the first time I've completely lost a named variety of Anthurium in such a long time I don't even know how long it's been. (The NOID purple is kind of still on the ropes, but the original plant, after being cut back, has a single sprout, and I also rooted the cuttings I took off. One set of cuttings was potted up in soil and is living in the basement; the other is still in water and lives in the plant room. It's been a long time since I got a bloom, and will probably be a lot longer, but the NOID purple is not yet completely gone.)

'Midori' wasn't the best at producing seedlings, either, it turns out. I've potted up nine so far, of which four are still alive,3 and there are another 16 seeds in the cupcake containers in the basement, which may or may not ever get big enough to transplant, and may or may not survive transplanting. It sure feels like 'Midori' seeds germinate and grow a lot more slowly than seeds from my other plants, though I suppose I may just be impatient.

It turned out that I don't actually need 'Midori,' because at least one of my existing parent plants (probably the NOID red) already has genes for green blooms, but it was weird and I liked it and it makes me sad that it died.

The other two notable recent deaths 4 are 0064 "Augusta Wynndt" and 0592 "Tess LeCoil." Tess you'll probably remember from February, when I talked about her . . . unusual growth.

Photo: 22 January 2015.

It got bigger after that:

Photo: 11 March 2015.

For a while, the growth (one doesn't want to say tumor, though possibly it was) looked like it was even thinking of building some leaves -- you can see one in the above picture. I kept thinking, every time I watered it, oh, I should probably throw Tess away, there's no way that can be healthy, and if it's due to a virus or something I don't want it to spread to the other plants, but then I wouldn't throw it away because of the paperwork involved.5 Fortunately, it solved the problem for me, by spontaneously killing off that whole section:

Photo: 27 June 2015.

Though 1) by the time that happened, I'd thought maybe I should . . . enough times that I still felt sort of obligated to throw it out, and 2) it looked like possibly it was gearing up to do the same thing all over again -- that stumpy little green thing to the right in the picture seemed awfully familiar.

0064 "Augusta Wynndt" never built up her bizarre growth to the size Tess did, but only because I wouldn't let her. For a solid three years or so, Augusta grew normally, but at some point during this last winter (I think?), the growing tip started to do whatever Tess had been doing. So I cut it off, thinking that the plant might make new growing tips, which would have a normal shape to them, but apparently things don't work that way. (In particular, check out the larger lump on the left center, which may or may not be doing what Tess did but in any case is clearly not developing normally.) So Augusta and Tess were thrown away on June 23, and that is that.

So there you have it. The next Anthurium post will be happier. Or at least less morbid. Probably both.

2 comments:

It might actually be a tumour (caused by Agrobacterium tumefaciens or something similar). I had to throw out my Sparmannia africana earlier this year for the same reason. I'd noticed it wasn't looking good (dropping leaves, branches dying back) and I'd seen there was some weird growth just above the soil surface, but I didn't figure out what was going on until I the pest and disease control class I had to take this winter (where the teacher showed us such a tumour, among other things.)

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